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Mohsin Hamid

Biography

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels MOTH SMOKE, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST and HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA. His fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review, and his essays in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. Born in 1971, he has lived about half his life, on and off, in Lahore. He also spent part of his early childhood in California, attended Princeton and Harvard, and worked for a decade in New York and London.

Mohsin Hamid

Books by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid’s stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family and identity. In DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political, and are shot through with the same passion, imagination and breathtaking shifts of perspective that gives his fiction its unmistakable electric charge.

Mohsin Hamid’s third novel follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else, on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite "valuation" firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his infatuation with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society, but in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.